


love and a steady hand

by forsanethaec



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Community: tsn_kinkmeme, Fluff, Harvard-era, M/M, Writing on Skin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-09
Updated: 2012-08-09
Packaged: 2017-11-11 19:23:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsanethaec/pseuds/forsanethaec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>it’s an accident that eduardo gets into the habit of scribbling little notes onto mark’s skin. it’s maybe less of an accident that mark can’t ever seem to wash them off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	love and a steady hand

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted for [this](http://tsn-kinkmeme.livejournal.com/12119.html?thread=21203031#t21203031) kinkmeme prompt.

It’s four in the morning the first time it happens, with the midwinter night pressing snow-blanketed and plum-colored against the windows in Kirkland. Eduardo fell asleep on Mark’s bed a couple of hours ago, maybe, half-upright. The open pages of his Econ textbook are getting crumpled beneath his arm. Mark’s been too zoned on hammering out the opening pieces of his midterm CS project to kick him out, the lines of code coming so fast that it’s like drawing one unbroken line down a roll of butcher paper. He’s in the middle of a good thing, here, inspired, unblinking – and then his computer freezes. 

“Fuck.” His hands keep typing into nothing for a moment, like running legs lifted off the ground that go on wheeling of their own accord. He’s all saved and everything, that’s not the problem, but _fuck this is going to go away any second_ , he can feel the thought he’d been riffing on slipping out of his mind like sand through fingers. 

“Eduardo,” he says, a reflex, turning around. There’s a ballpoint pen in the crease of Eduardo’s textbook and Mark kind of lunges for it, rolling forward unsteadily on the carpet in his desk chair. 

“Eduardo,” he says again, pointlessly, because when Eduardo’s out like this mid-studying he’s out for good. He thinks for a second of scribbling in the margins of Eduardo’s textbook, but he thinks Eduardo might object to that, so he goes for the next closest thing – Eduardo’s hand. 

He’s got his fingers underneath it, cupped palm up, and he’s already scribbled out half a line across the soft heartlines on Eduardo’s skin when Eduardo stirs beneath him.

“Mark?”

“Stay still, I’m almost done,” Mark says tersely. His mouth tastes foul, the staleness that comes with breathing through your nose and not moving for several hours in the middle of the night, and his face is very close to Eduardo’s, he notices belatedly, but he’s… “Almost done,” he mutters again, tongue between his teeth. Eduardo is squinting at him, blinking sleepily from Mark’s face to his hand and the chicken-scratches of ink sprawling across it. 

“Interesting change in technology,” Eduardo comments, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with his free hand.

“My computer froze.” 

“Mark, I’ve been meaning to tell you about this great new invention called _paper_ , they’re saying it’s the next big—”

“Your hand was next to the pen.” Mark stops, abruptly, reads through his handiwork once, then sits back. “And I did consider using your textbook first, so. You’re welcome.”

“Ah,” Eduardo says drily. “My hero.” He yawns hugely. 

Mark ignores this, sliding his hand up Eduardo’s wrist and closing his fingers around it, the soft skin on the inside of his forearm a riot of texture with code and the shadows of his veins. “Come on, I have to transcribe,” he says, mouth quirking. 

Eduardo sighs heavily as he swings his feet over the side of the bed and follows Mark to perch beside him on the edge of his desk. “Next time you wake me up from a dead sleep for help with your homework, I want breakfast in bed.” 

“It’s four in the morning.”

“And.”

Mark smiles, blinking rapidly a few times as he settles into focus on his computer screen and starts to poke at the keys to make it come back to life. Looking at your bed in the middle of a highly productive all-nighter is one of the most dangerous possible things to do, he thinks, stifling a yawn, and he pulls Eduardo’s arm closer and begins to type. Their legs are kind of tangled up from the odd angle, but he’s too sleepy to do anything about it. 

Eduardo takes his textbook and goes to sleep on the couch after that, grumbling about how much soap he’s going to have to use to get this all off, and Mark crawls into bed two hours later, curling unconsciously into the spot Eduardo had occupied. He’s probably imagining that it’s still warm, but he falls asleep smiling. 

He wakes to the quiet sound of his own name and Eduardo’s face quite close to his, and reaches out reflexively with grasping fists like a child, tangling his fingers in the collar of Eduardo’s wool peacoat before he really realizes what’s going on. 

“It’s 7:50,” Eduardo says. He’s crouched at eye level by the side of Mark’s bed. “You have an 8 a.m.,” he adds when Mark just blinks at him in sleepless confusion.

“Okay,” Mark says, squinting. 

“Okay.” Eduardo’s smile is like a slow sunrise. He takes Mark’s hand to dislodge it from his shirt, and then Mark feels something small and metallic pressing into his skin, sliding over the side of his wrist. Eduardo’s pulled a pen out of his pocket, he realizes after a moment, and he’s writing something on Mark’s skin that Mark can’t make out from his upside-down vantage point. 

He relinquishes his hold on Mark wordlessly when he’s done, standing and tucking the pen behind his ear into his mess of hair, turning up the collar of his coat. 

“Later,” he says.

“Bye,” Mark groans, rolling onto his back and blinking heavily at the ceiling. After a moment, he lifts his hand to his face.

_don’t go back to sleep_

He rolls his eyes, huffing out a laugh in spite of himself, and turns his face toward the common room. Eduardo’s already gone. Mark manages to haul himself out of bed anyway, though, and he makes it to his 8 o’clock. He doesn’t wash the writing off for the rest of the day, carrying it inside the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie like a totem. He doesn’t fall asleep in any of his classes. 

***

Eduardo is looking at him like he's a zoo animal that night over dinner in Eliot for no apparent reason. Mark just goes on blithely eating his spaghetti, because he never has any idea what makes Eduardo give him the looks he gives him and there’s not much point in trying to find out. 

"Mark," Eduardo says finally, in that tone he uses when he's trying to sound patient but is really either exasperated or bewildered. "Give me your hand."

Mark raises an eyebrow and sticks his hand out. 

“No, the other one.”

Mark obliges and Eduardo takes his wrist and turns it over. His fingers on Mark’s skin have the over-warmth of someone who’s recently come inside from the biting cold. 

“Do you ever wash your hands?” Eduardo says, shaking his head, and Mark realizes that he’s looking at the message he had scrawled on the side of Mark’s wrist himself two mornings ago, still quite legible, if a little smudged. 

“It was useful,” Mark says with a shrug. “It kept me awake in class.”

Eduardo chuckles. “You’re going to get, like, blood poisoning or something.” 

“That is not how science works.” 

Eduardo ignores this, still looking down at Mark’s hand, and then he looks up through his lashes with such obvious, sudden affection that Mark has to look away. 

“Stop that,” Mark mutters, biting back a smile. “Give me my hand back.”

“Wait,” Eduardo says. He leans away to dig around in his bag on the empty chair next to him, still holding onto Mark’s hand, thumb now pressed casually into the center of his palm. Mark glances around, feeling his face color slightly, but no one is paying attention. It’s not that he minds the contact, precisely, it’s more – well, he’s not really sure. 

“Here.” Eduardo turns back to face him, a ballpoint pen in hand. Mark rolls his eyes. 

“You know, I seem to remember you telling me something about this cool new thing called paper a while back.”

Eduardo grins, pulling Mark’s hand toward him so it’s half-cradled in the shell of his personal space. He writes something above where there’s already ink, biting his lip in concentration, then sits back, letting go. Mark looks. 

_WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS!!_

“Oh, that’s good,” Mark says. “Helpful. Not ironic at all.”

Eduardo nods sagely, already back to picking at his salad, but he’s smiling. 

In the shower later that night, Mark scrubs at his hand, watching the ink fade, and can’t help but feel a little bereft. The skin looks oddly naked without Eduardo’s curving script etched upon it in black and blue. He thinks about the way Eduardo had looked at him when he’d realized Mark had kept the words around just to be reminded of them, that characteristic softness to his eyes, like Mark is all at once the strangest and stupidest and most hopelessly wonderful thing in the universe. 

It makes him feel silly and ridiculous and warm in his chest, and he tries to put the image – of the writing, and of Eduardo, too – from his mind. Rather unsurprisingly, neither is very easily forgotten.   
   
***

They’re at Anna’s at MIT two weeks later when Mark remembers something. 

“My professor liked your part of my thing,” he tells Eduardo around a mouthful of burrito (chicken, white rice, cheese, guac, hot salsa and no beans because beans are for suckers).

“My your what?”

“The thing I – wrote on you,” Mark says, swallowing and licking his lips. “It was for a project.”

Eduardo grins, lifting his and wiggling his fingers. “It’s my magic touch.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Mark says, mouth curving. Eduardo snorts into his diet coke. 

***

The Friday morning before spring break, Eduardo comes into the suite, bag on his shoulder and suitcase wheeling behind him. He’s got on jeans and his North Face, half-unzipped. Mark can see the collar of an unseasonably lineny shirt underneath, the deep, saturated blue of the American flag.

“Hey,” Eduardo says, shutting the door behind him. Mark’s by the mantelpiece, looking for his house key. He lifts his chin in greeting.

“Where are you going?”

“Home, remember?” Eduardo sighs happily. “Home home. São Paulo.” 

“Hence the shirt?”

Eduardo looks down at it, then back up at Mark, mouth quirking. “Yes, the shirt. Since when do you notice shirts?”

Mark shrugs, demurring. “I don’t know. It’s… a shirt.” 

“Very true.” 

“When’s your flight?”

“In, like, two and a half hours. I’m about to go get a cab to Logan.” 

Mark nods. “My train’s at the ass crack of dawn tomorrow.” He resumes his picking apart of the random debris scattered across the mantelpiece. 

Eduardo stands his bags against the wall and sits down on the couch, propping his ankle across his knee and leaning back. “What’s that on your hand?” he asks, nodding.

Mark glances down at it. “Pre-break to-do list I wrote during class.”

Eduardo raises an eyebrow. “You write to-do lists, ever?”

“It’s a boring fucking class.” 

“Let me see.”

Mark sighs and comes to sit in the chair caddy-corner to the sofa, sticking out his hand obligingly. The motion feels comfortably familiar, and so does the gentle pressure of Eduardo’s fingers, the light, insistent pull, though Mark studiously ignores this thought. 

“House key,” Eduardo reads, “systems take-home, laundry – is that to do or to bring home?”

Mark scoffs. “Please, bring home.” 

“Well,” Eduardo says thoughtfully, still peering down at Mark’s hand, and it occurs to Mark that why does Eduardo even need to _hold his hand_ to read it but, well, fine. “This is a list. I’m impressed.”

“I’m 75 percent done with my freshman year at Harvard,” Mark notes blandly. “I have life skills now.” 

“Ha,” Eduardo says on a huff of breath, grinning lopsided. “Good one.”

“Give me my hand back. I need it to be an adult.”

“Hang on. Do you have a pen?”

“Oh my god.”

“Humor me.”

Mark rolls his eyes, but he fishes a ballpoint out of his hoodie pocket and hands it over. Clicking it, Eduardo bends down to add something to Mark’s list. 

_train ticket_

“Oh,” Mark says with genuine surprise. “Yeah. Good call.” 

Eduardo smiles. “That’s what I’m here for.”

Mark smiles back at him, chin tilted down, not half as grudgingly as he’d intended. Eduardo just keeps looking at him with that same expression on his face, as though he’s kind of forgotten that anything besides Mark exists. There’s that soft curve to his mouth and that blue shirt deep and lovely against the divots of his collarbones meeting at his throat, and Mark knows he hasn’t taken his hand back yet and he can’t bring himself to do anything about it. 

It was like this at fall and winter breaks, too, the first long absences and the slight, nervous tug of separation anxiety, but things are undeniably different now. He hasn’t realized it until this moment, how Eduardo has shifted into a new rut in his mind, compartmentalized in an unfamiliar place. It’s as though Mark’s discovering a part of himself he had never known was there before, having someone like this who cares and cares and cares so unshakably, and finding himself able to tolerate it as easily as breathing. 

His fingers curl within Eduardo’s hold. “You’ll miss your flight,” he prompts at length, and he tugs his hand away. Eduardo lets him do it, his face coloring slightly. He stands.

“Yeah,” he says briskly, retrieving his bags from by the door. “Hey. Safe travels, man.”

“See you soon,” Mark says, the corner of his mouth lifting. 

“Tchau!” Eduardo calls over his shoulder as he closes the door behind him. 

Mark lets his breath out in a whoosh when Eduardo’s gone, looking around the empty room and gritting his teeth to tamp down the various unexpected feelings churning in his stomach. He busies himself again looking for his house key, and once he’s found it (between the couch cushions), he goes and prints his train ticket out, too. 

***

The first thing Mark’s mom does when he gets in the car at the train station is grab his hand and yank it up to eye level. 

“Honey, you shouldn’t write on yourself,” she says, aghast. “It’s bad for your skin.” 

“It’s fine.” He sinks down in the passenger seat and twists his other hand around the seatbelt. _And it’s not just me doing the writing_ , he adds mentally, but that’s not important. 

When he opens his eyes the next morning in his own bed with his hand half-tucked beneath his cheek, Eduardo’s handwriting is the first thing he sees. It’s a small but immediate comfort to offset the slight confusion of waking up in a room where he hasn’t slept in a couple of months, and he blinks fondly at it for a few moments, too sleepy to try to suppress the welling-up of that feeling. 

And that must be why it happens that he doesn’t wash it off the whole week. He showers and everything, but he treats that little part of his hand like he’s got stitches he isn’t supposed to get wet. He’s careful not to let his mom see, either. Randi’s away on Alternative Spring Break in Montana or something, so she’s not around to give him the grief he knows he’d get if she got wind of any part of this. His dad, being his dad, either doesn’t notice or doesn’t give a shit. 

It’s just – it’s kind of like carrying around a little bit of Eduardo with him, a reminder that there’s someone who, if he were here, would be telling Mark to go to bed at a moderately reasonable hour or reminding him to do the homework he would absolutely have forgotten otherwise. That treatment feels unnecessary, even mothering to the point of annoyance, when Mark isn’t at home with his actual mother – but now that he is, he grasps the difference. Mark’s mother is the only person in the world who would act like this toward him no matter what he was like. She’s his mother. That’s what mothers do. Eduardo has no such obligation – and yet he does it anyway. He cares. His thoughts of Mark’s well-being are such that he hands them over, gives them to Mark to take with, and Mark does. He wants to collect them like they’re those rare pieces of fortune cookie wisdom that are actually wise. 

Because there’s something amazing about that, Eduardo thinking of him. That Eduardo, sitting there in the common room two and a half hours before his flight to Brazil, would be thinking first and foremost of Mark making it onto the Northeast Regional the next day. It’s a foreign concept, that kind of care, but Mark can’t pretend he’s fixed on it out of only clinical curiosity. 

The truth is, it feels good to be doted on by someone who has no reason to do it other than they think you’re worth the time. Mark’s able to admit that. And he does, with a warm little twist in his chest every time he looks down at Eduardo’s writing on his hand. 

Eduardo, being Eduardo, notices almost immediately when he walks into the suite to say hello the night Mark gets back. His flight got in that morning – he is tanner even than Mark would have sarcastically predicted – and Mark’s just come from South Station. His roommate isn’t coming back until tomorrow. 

“You don’t bathe, do you,” Eduardo says when he sees Mark’s hand. “It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone.” 

“I bathed _around it_ , thank you,” Mark says. “If nothing else, my mother holds me to a reasonable standard of hygiene when I’m under her roof.”

“So obviously she made an exception for an outdated hand to-do list.”

“I didn’t let her see it.” The sentence loses momentum halfway through as Mark realizes that it doesn’t mean the preservation of said to-do list makes any more than no sense. Eduardo’s got a similar question written on his face, and Mark fixes his eyes on an interesting piece of carpet and mutters, “I liked… I don’t know. Having your handwriting around.” He feels his ears go hot. 

Eduardo’s face is doing something very strange and complicated when Mark next looks up.

It’s as though he’s fighting down the urge to blurt something out, and as though he’s scared, maybe, and also – this is the part Mark can identify most clearly – as though Mark is the most absurdly perfect accident of existence in this and every universe. It’s not the sort of look Mark would ever have bet he’d be able to elucidate from the hundreds of facial reflexes that go into expressing the infinite subtleties of emotion (or giving the appearance of doing so), but that was before he met Eduardo: Eduardo, who wears his heart on his sleeve under the most enigmatic of circumstances, and who, when it comes to Mark, is about as un-enigmatic as the ABCs. 

Finally Eduardo says in a slight rush, “I need to tell you something but I can’t say it out loud.”

“Okay.” Mark flicks an eyebrow at him. “You could write it.” He means for it to sound sardonic but his breath hitches a little without his permission, and his heart has begun to beat faster and he doesn’t know why, only he can’t stop looking at the slow flush rising across Eduardo’s sun-warmed cheeks.

He sticks out his hand.

Eduardo looks momentarily startled. Mark shrugs as if to say, _what did you think I meant?_

There’s a pen on the coffee table and Eduardo picks it up gingerly and takes Mark’s hand in his, like he’s asking him to dance standing here in the middle of the suite’s common room, his fingers sliding delicately into the warm hollow of Mark’s palm and around the peak of his wrist. Mark wonders at it, suddenly awkward and fearful and frozen, anchored, in one. Within the hinge of an instant, something has begun to go on, and Mark has no idea what it is and he can’t move, staring at Eduardo’s bowed head. 

Eduardo scrawls something on his skin, quickly, his downturned face almost glowing pink, and then straightens up. 

Mark waits, but Eduardo doesn’t let go of his hand, so he tugs it toward himself with an exasperated little frown, twisting, Eduardo’s fingers around his wrist and against his palm coming with. 

The words are small, a narrow, slanting line. 

_i really want to kiss you_

“Wardo,” Mark goes, a little heart-trip of a sound, looking up sharply into Eduardo’s face. Eduardo is standing there stock-still in silence with anxious eyes and lips parted and his face all lit up blushing, and then they’re both just staring at each other. 

It’s Mark who ends up leaning in with no clue what he’s doing or why, a fraction of a hesitant inch and then another and then all the way, Eduardo’s hand clasped around his the anchor point between them so that he can close his eyes and still find his way to press their mouths together.

Eduardo kind of melts into him as soon as their lips touch, notching together, soft and unsure. Mark can feel it in the way his tense shoulders drop forward and his hand tightens around Mark’s, and Mark squeezes back and tugs so that those hands are by their sides and he can nudge his other one around the small of Eduardo’s back and draw him in. It feels like they really are about to waltz now but Mark could not possibly care less, as he feels Eduardo’s fingers card into his hair at the back of his head and the cold tip of his nose nudge into Mark’s cheek and his lips moving, nipping into Mark’s mouth as though he can’t stop himself. There’s the ghost of a keen at the back of someone’s throat and Mark realizes it’s his own and he shivers, helpless, against Eduardo.

It feels like hours, though it isn’t really, before Mark detaches himself with a quiet gasp, tipping their foreheads together. Eduardo lifts their still-clasped hands and presses Mark’s within his to his own cheek, nuzzling into it, looking up at him through his lashes and pressing a slight, sidelong kiss to Mark’s palm, like he’s hardly aware that he’s doing it. 

It’s an instant thing, now, Mark wanting to kiss Eduardo when he looks at his lovely dark eyes and his stupidly perfect skin and the little dimple at the end of his nose, and the way he looks at Mark, all laid out and helpless. Mark gets that, finally. It’s not just Eduardo’s hand keeping Mark’s pressed with open, wondering adoration to his cheek.

After a long moment filled with a helpless sort of gazing in which Mark feels profoundly ridiculous and profoundly unable to do anything about it, he tugs his hand out of Eduardo’s and twists it around to read the writing on the back of his hand again: the list with both their handwritings in a fading scrawl like his skin is a palimpsest, a brief, aging chronicle of their history. 

And then there’s, _i really want to kiss you_ , which. That. Mark stares at it for a long time, wanting to take a mental picture in the eventuality – not that this is something he’s going to make any serious moves toward doing, but still – that it has to get washed off. 

He looks up at Eduardo, his heart doing something painful and erratic and vitally wonderful in his chest.

“What else?” he asks, the words coming quick and a little breathless. Eduardo’s eyes go round. Mark’s pretty sure he’s blushing but he makes himself maintain eye contact. 

Eduardo grabs the pen from off the couch and clicks it open again, and he looks at Mark like he’s not really sure if this is real life or just a very vivid dream. The skin of his cheeks and nose and the shadow of his throat and the open space around his collar is flushed bright pink atop the caramel gold that came of too much time in the São Paulo sun and Mark thinks it’s the most beautiful color he’s ever seen and he wants to get his mouth on it, that desire coming very suddenly and forcefully, and he thinks _fuck the pen_ and reaches out and pulls Eduardo in by the fabric of his shirt. His lips catch Eduardo’s right as he’s about to speak, so it’s sloppy and awkward and it takes a moment for them to fit together, a re-angling that requires Mark’s hand in Eduardo’s hair and both Eduardo’s arms around his back, one hand rucking up his shirt and Eduardo’s hand on his skin feels incredible and Mark doesn’t know what to do to get more of that so he moves kind of at random, tangling them together in a mess of stumbling legs and feet, laughing ruefully, breathlessly into each other’s mouths. 

“Go,” Mark murmurs against Eduardo’s lips, smirking, pushing into him so that he finally manages to trip them backwards toward Mark’s bed. They end up in a pile of limbs, Mark half straddled across Eduardo’s thighs, and then, quite suddenly, the world is turning and Eduardo’s got him flat on his back, pinning his wrists to the bedspread. 

“I can tell you what else,” he says, voice husky. Mark can hear a faint, excited tremble in it and it sends a thrill down his spine. He nods kind of frantically. 

Eduardo shifts against him, the pen still in his hand. Their legs are practically in a knot at this point, and he angles his body awkwardly to get to the blue-veined inside of Mark’s forearm, which is facing up where it’s pinned into the mattress by the heel of Eduardo’s palm. 

He starts to scribble something, and Mark has to swallow down a shiver at the slight tickle of the pen tip on his skin, which makes him feel immensely absurd and hot all over in one. 

Eduardo lifts his writing hand when he’s done but not the hand holding Mark down, so Mark turns his head to read: 

_i watch you coding and think about your fingers_

The blush on Eduardo’s face is practically virulent when Mark looks up at him – and he loves this vantage point immediately, stuck beneath Eduardo with nowhere to look but up into his face and the looming angles of his body, fucking hell, why had they never thought of this before? – but Mark licks his lips and says, “Where?” 

His voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to him. Eduardo makes a little noise, a weak “oh” in the back of his throat, lips falling open, and Mark honestly can’t believe this is happening. He’s fighting the urge by turns to burst out laughing and to upend them completely and tackle Eduardo to the bed and tear all his clothes off. 

Tongue between his teeth, Eduardo bends down again and puts the pen to Mark’s skin, then he stops and shakes his head.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” He looks down at Mark with that dopey, sheepish smile on his lips, and Mark grins and takes a steadying breath.

“Wardo, if you don’t tell me what to do with my fingers we’re never going to get anywhere,” he says before he can think twice about it. 

“Oh, God.” Eduardo kind of collapses against him, seemingly overwhelmed. He hides his face in the crook of Mark’s shoulder. “You… Mark, I, I think about you all the time, I—”

Mark shushes him, resisting the urge to bite at the shell of Eduardo’s ear. “It’s okay,” he says, and Eduardo sits up, his eyes huge and doleful, giving Mark that look like he can’t believe he’s real. Mark nods, prompting, rolling his eyes. “Go.”

“Okay,” Eduardo says softly, and maybe Mark’s imagining it but he thinks he can feel both their rapid heartbeats thrumming through their bodies, chasing one another in an erratic off-rhythm. “Okay.” Eduardo licks his lips and leans in to scribble something else beneath the first thing he’d written. Mark turns his head.

_my mouth_

“Jesus,” Mark mutters. His every nerve ending is alight. 

“Will you please let me stop writing embarrassing things on you now so I can kiss you again?”

“Wardo,” Mark gasps, half-laughing, and he pushes up against Eduardo’s hold on his arms until Eduardo lets him go and he can wrap his arms tight around Eduardo’s shoulders and get their mouths together again, too much tongue and their bodies a disaster of wayward limbs and smearing ink. He drags his lips down to bite at Eduardo’s jawline, up to the soft hinge at his ear, hands clutching everywhere, in Eduardo’s hair and the back of his shirt and why is Eduardo still wearing his shirt again? 

“Clothes,” Mark vocalizes helpfully, and Eduardo nods, lips slipping across Mark’s cheekbone, and detaches them a few inches so he can yank his shirt off and Mark can do the same. They kick their shoes off, too, the movements spastic and impatient, and then they’re back together. 

Mark slides his hands up Eduardo’s chest, marveling at all the new skin there is to touch (and that _color_ ), and then he looks up curiously at Eduardo’s flushed face, the mottled red along his jaw. He lifts his hand and runs his thumb over the wet swell of Eduardo’s lower lip, and Eduardo’s mouth falls open, whether in surprise or an instinctive obedience Mark isn’t sure, and then Mark slides his index finger in.

Eduardo actually _moans_ and he grabs Mark’s wrist immediately, lips closing around Mark’s finger, and he sucks it in and Mark thinks he maybe blacks out for a second, the hard ridges of Eduardo’s palate and the hot slick of his tongue getting at Mark’s first knuckle and then his second, pulling him in until Mark can feel the soft of the back of his mouth and he gasps quietly. Eduardo looks up at him through his lashes, cheeks hollowed, and it’s literally the hottest thing Mark has ever seen. He slips his middle finger past Eduardo’s lips then, and he really, really can’t believe this is happening, the tight wet heat of Eduardo’s mouth, the pressure of suction and the noises it makes, the warmth of Eduardo’s breath from his nose and the way he’s _looking_ at Mark, all half-lidded and his pupils blown and the flush high in his cheeks. 

It’s a little sad to pull his hand away from Eduardo’s mouth, but far better to hear the noise Eduardo makes at the loss and better still to get his own mouth at Eduardo’s collarbone, to push him backward onto the mattress and fall over top of him and tangle them together, trying to pull a red mark from every inch of Eduardo’s skin he can reach, feeling the way his body arches as Mark slides his hands downward. And it’s no surprise to find that Eduardo is hard in his dress pants, but it’s a new thrill for Mark to slot their thighs together like the teeth of a zipper and rut downward, dropping his head with a groan to the curve of Eduardo’s shoulder. He’s basically humping Eduardo’s leg but he doesn’t care, because the pressure is incredible and he immediately needs more of it.

“Mark,” Eduardo gasps out when Mark’s fingers fumble at his own fly. He gets his jeans and boxers down to his knees but is too impatient to kick them off all the way, and then he starts in on Eduardo’s. Eduardo’s head drops back onto the bed, one arm thrown over his eyes like he can’t believe this is happening. 

Eduardo lifts his hips as Mark tugs at his waistband, and then – there’s a dick. Unsurprisingly, it’s very nice. Mark just stares at it for a second, unsure. He could be efficient, or he could try to drag this out, take his time. Then Eduardo’s hips jolt a little, pleading, and Mark decides he just wants to get his hands on him.

He fits their hips together, leaning down close to Eduardo and tangling one hand in his hair, which is all over the goddamn place at this point, and fists his hand around his cock and Eduardo’s, thumbing them tight together. “ _God_ ,” Eduardo half-sobs out, and he pulls Mark’s head down to bite messily at his mouth, whole body trembling. It’s an incredible feeling, hot and velvety and just guttingly intimate, feeling Eduardo right up against him and being able to dip his head to kiss his gasping mouth at the same time. It’s like the feel of their bodies and the sound of their breath and fumbling skin is the whole universe, like there is nothing else beyond the two of them. Mark’s brimming over from the inside out with it, Eduardo, Eduardo, Eduardo. 

He pushes his hips down and Eduardo’s coming up to meet him now, clutching them together with his body a trembling spread-open mess beneath Mark and his fingers gripping in Mark’s hair and at his back, hard enough that it feels bruising, though it probably isn’t, but Mark’s predisposed toward feeling like Eduardo’s leaving an impression. He sucks a kiss into the hinge of Eduardo’s jaw, breathing hard and his wrist aching between them, and it’s haphazard and ridiculous and so, so good. 

“Meu deus,” Eduardo gasps into his neck, “Mark,” and the way the Portuguese elides with his name, alcoholic on Eduardo’s tongue, makes Mark’s head spin. 

“Fuck,” he bites out, his voice unrecognizable. Eduardo bites at his jaw, panting, and Mark re-angles his palm inexpertly and thinks that probably more than half of this is just getting off on each other and the thought actually makes it better, that this is sex but it’s just _them_ too and that’s incredible, it’s perfect. 

The noise that comes keening out of the back of this throat then is his first warning that he’s nearly there. He bites his lip hard, feeling Eduardo’s imprecise mouth somewhere near his temple, and he hears him say, “C’mon, Mark,” the words all hoarse and breathless, and then his hand is slowing, hips jerking forward, and he comes onto Eduardo’s tan stomach in sluggish white ropes, gasping. 

He pants for a few seconds into Eduardo’s neck, his whole body quivering, shoulders sinking, and then Eduardo’s hips buck fretfully beneath him and he finds the strength in his wiped-out muscles to move again. 

“Let me have the pen,” he says, sitting back slightly so he’s astride Eduardo’s thighs, and Eduardo fumbles for it somewhere in the bedclothes and he thrusts it into his hands. Mark keeps one hand loose around Eduardo’s cock, not enough pressure to let him come but just enough that he’s whining and his hips are stuttering up uselessly, as he clicks the pen open and leans closer to write one small black word in the soft, private dip of skin just inside the sharp peak of Eduardo’s hipbone, tongue sliding over his lower lip. 

He feels Eduardo’s abs tighten as he tries to sit up to see, still painted in a mess of pearly white that makes Mark’s already flushed face feel hot. “What does it say?” he asks, breathy and desperate. 

Mark looks into his eyes, a small, off-kilter smile curving his mouth. “Mine,” he says quietly, and in the same moment he tightens his grip and twists his wrist, once, twice, and Eduardo comes, helplessly, all over Mark’s hand. His mouth is a perfect, theatrical O, his eyebrows pinched and his long neck arched, and it’s like he can’t help it, like there’s nothing in that moment that could have kept him from coming, and Mark takes it all in like it’s the most pricelessly amazing thing he’s ever seen, because it kind of is. 

His fingers are still flexed against Eduardo’s cock, but Eduardo gasps as his body stills, “Okay, okay, stop,” oversensitive, so Mark takes his hand away and then they’re just sitting there tangled up with each other, messy and marked up and breathing heavily. 

“Jesus,” Eduardo says, and he laughs suddenly and then claps a hand to his mouth. “Jesus,” he mutters again. He surveys the damage, and Mark does too. There’s ink smudged in a lot of random places. It must have been one of those pens. 

Eduardo lifts his hips awkwardly to pull up his pants, Mark watching unabashedly because he’s allowed to do that now, before he sits up. 

“Bathroom,” Eduardo tells him with that adorable sheepish expression on his flushed face, and Mark curls his hand (the one not sticky with jizz) around Eduardo’s neck and pulls him in to kiss him soundly. Eduardo tips their foreheads together when he pulls back, eyes closed, just breathing, and Mark is caught off-guard by the momentary pang of fear he feels at how quietly wonderful that is, cutting into his afterglow with sudden, brazen intensity. It’s the kind of wonderful he had never imagined he’d have, nor that he’d be able to appreciate for being wonderful, but he does, and – that’s something. That’s new. 

He finds a tissue and wipes his hand off when Eduardo’s out of the room, then kicks off his jeans, pulls his boxers back up and flops back onto the bed, utterly grateful that it’s his own and wanting suddenly nothing more than to sleep. 

Eduardo stops in the doorway when he comes back, smiling at Mark in that way Mark never knows what he’s done to deserve. 

“Can I stay?” he asks softly. 

Mark yawns and thumps the space on the twin bed beside him, easily. Smile widening, Eduardo crosses the room and stretches out alongside Mark, fitting their bodies together, a sleepy jumble of ink-smudged limbs and Mark’s nose in his hair.

Later, it’s Mark who ends up awake in the dark suite, watching Eduardo sleep curled into him on his side on top of Mark’s arm. He thumbs lightly at the hollow of his hip and the word there, _mine_ , half-smiling even though no one is awake to see. His hand drifts up, over Eduardo's skin, through his hair and down the back of his neck and between his shoulderblades, the muscles relaxed in sleep. 

He finds his fingers drawing circles, rhythmic spirals, like a dance or a swinging pendulum, and he wonders when that became habit, to want to make these gentle marks on each other, these intimate sorts of inscriptions. Did it start with lines of code scribbled across Eduardo's palm in a late-night fervor, or has it been deeper-seated, an instinct toward chronicling the timeline of their give and take, the minute alterations they’ve made to one another? 

Mark isn't sure. He knows only how very comfortable it is to want to etch these little things onto Eduardo's skin and to want them etched on him in return, in ink and quiet touches, as though without each another they’re no more than blank canvases.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but he wakes up early with the first far-off rumble of a T bus, the sound jarring and unfamiliar after a week away. It’s a good thing. 

“Wardo,” he mumbles groggily, rubbing his eyes. “You’ve gotta go.”

Eduardo shifts against him, a crease appearing between his eyebrows as his mouth moves indistinctly. Mark shakes him a little.

“My roommate’s coming back soon,” he says a little more clearly, and Eduardo opens his eyes, squinting. 

“’Kay,” he says finally, sitting up with a yawn. He swings his legs over the edge of the bed. “Come over later?” he asks, looking back at Mark and smiling.

“Yeah,” Mark says. “And Wardo –” he reaches out to fan his fingers lightly over Eduardo’s hip where it’s marked with last night’s ink. “Don’t wash that off,” he says, mouth curving as he looks up at Eduardo’s face just in time to see the blush spread in a stripe across his nose. 

“You’re ridiculous,” Eduardo tells him, and he leans down and kisses Mark on the mouth, just for a second, nipping at his lower lip. “And I won’t,” he adds in a whisper as he pulls away, so intimately and conspiratorially close to Mark’s lips that it thrills bodily through him. 

He thinks, smudging absently at the ink on his own arm as he watches Eduardo slipping into his shoes, that he could pretty easily get used to this.


End file.
